> Property tax breaks in my locale lead to empty lots and empty buildings, which is the least efficient use of land imaginable.
Property tax breaks create no such incentive. Consider that you own a lot in a high demand area. It may appreciate in value over time whether you develop it or not, but if you develop it immediately then you can rent it out and receive that value on top of any appreciation, so which is more profitable?
The policy that actually creates a strong incentive to underutilize land is rent control. Then the investor who wants the appreciation can't build something and rent it out in the meantime or when they go to sell the building later, its value will be lower because it's full of tenants paying below-market rents who won't leave until they die of old age. Whereas if they leave the lot vacant or the building empty then when it comes time to sell they can turn it into condos that sell for the full market rate. We would do well to pass a federal law banning rent control nationwide.
> Aside, I’m a fan of Georgism in theory.
Georgism is land value tax, not property tax. That's a completely different thing because it doesn't tax the buildings. But it also creates a weird incentive for developers, and correspondingly a huge perverse incentive for the government.
Because the obvious thing to do when there is LVT is to build multi-unit buildings, even if the surrounding area is low density and couldn't otherwise justify it. Which the government would then have the perverse incentive to suppress because they don't get any more LVT revenue but would have more residents consuming government services. And then you get the government suppressing efficient land use by e.g. mandating single-family zoning and large lots everywhere.
So to make it work you would have to deny the government the authority to impose zoning density restrictions or anything with an equivalent effect.
> I’m sure wealth managers are already devising strategies for reducing taxable wealth based on speculative laws and regulations. This shouldn’t be a reason not to proceed, but instead to put more resources to effective design.
The effective design looks like breaking up large corporations or taxing them directly (e.g. VAT) rather than taxing the holders of their shares.
And notice how the lobbyists frame this: VAT and corporate income tax are structurally similar. In both cases a tax is paid on the company's revenue minus its expenses; the expenses are then revenue to the supplier. The difference is what happens when the supply chain crosses a jurisdictional boundary. For corporate income tax, the tax is paid to the jurisdiction where the corporation reports profits, which it can structure its operations to choose and thereby avoid taxes. For VAT, the tax is paid to the jurisdiction where the corporation's customers are, which multinational corporations can't easily change. Their lobbyists then come up with nonsense arguments claiming that VAT is regressive but corporate income tax isn't, even though for a domestic supply chain they have the same effect and for an international supply chain it's corporate income tax that allows rich corporations owned by billionaires to have a tax advantage over small businesses owned by middle class domestic proprietors.
By contrast, there is no real effective design for a wealth tax because the problems with it are reality problems rather than design problems. People can enter into arbitrarily complicated contracts involving high uncertainty or private information or foreign parties, and regularly do, that the government has no way to accurately value. But as soon as they inaccurately value anything it becomes a tax shelter.